macsbug

[Ben Stanley]

Hi,

I use mol to run a program that I wrote for my PhD, which requires some 
kind of old MacOS. I'm currently running 9.1 on advice that it is more 
stable than 9.2.2, and it seems fine.

However, my software often has problems which cause it to drop into 
macsbug. This puts the screen into 2 or 4 colour mode (2 bits per 
pixel). mol cannot display this in either x11 mode or console mode. It 
gives you a black screen. I can't get out of this state so I am forced 
to kill the emulator and re-start mol if I ever get dropped into macsbug 
by mistake.

Some bugs in my software just can't be found without using macsbug, so I 
was wondering what it would take to make it work.

I poked around a while ago wondering where I would add support for the 
2bpp video mode. I presume it would go in the x11 video driver file. How 
complicated would it be to add it? I realise the bit depth would have to 
be converted. It seems that I would have to add a new set of conversion 
routines and register the new mode in the video module initialisation 
code. But would I have to add support to the console driver as well?

Are there other more fundamental problems than this which prevent the 
use of macsbug? I haven't investigated further than not being able to 
see anything on the display...

Ben.